美国文学史扩充资料弟8部分.docVIP

《美国文学史》扩充资料第8部分 多元文化与当代美国文学 Part I. Background Reading（阅读要点）: （暂缺） Part II. Meet the Authors（作家简介）： Major American Jewish writers (1) Saul Bellow (1915-2005) BELLOW, SAUL (June 10, 1915-2005), American novelist, wrote: My parents emigrated to Canada from Russia in 1913--my father, a businessman, has often told me that he imported Egyptian onions into St. Petersburg—and settled in the town of Lachine, Quebec. I was born there in 1915, the youngest of four children. Until I was nine years old we lived in one of the poorest and most ancient districts of Montreal, on the slope of St. Dominick Street between the General Hospital and Rachel Market. In 1924 we moved to Chicago. I grew up there and consider myself a Chicagoan, out and out. Educated after a fashion in the Chicago schools, I entered the University of Chicago in 1933. In that year the Hutchins revolution was already under way and the university was, for me, a terrifying place. The dense atmosphere of learning, of cultural effort, heavily oppressed me; I felt that wisdom and culture were immense and that I was hopelessly small. In 1935 I transferred to Graduate school didnt suit me, however. I had a scholarship at the University of I will say this for my choice: there are many professions that one may follow without enthusiasm, but though there may be as many unenthusiastic novelists, proportionately, as there are unenthusiastic engineers or dentists, they must consider themselves infidels and they feel their unbelief and treason keenly. Vividness is what they must desire most and so they must value human existence or be unfaithful to their calling. Its obvious to everyone that the stature of characters in modern novels is smaller than it once was, and this diminution powerfully concerns those who value existence. I do not believe that human capacity to feel or do can really have dwindled or that the quality of humanity has degenerated. I rather think that people appear smaller because society has become s